Rodney Hide on the media jihad against law-abiding citizens

Rodney Hide discusses the Media party campaign on people and companies paying their “fair share”.

The depressing thing about the Panama Papers hullabaloo is the idea we must pay what the mob demands, not our legal obligation.

There’s no principle driving the mob’s assessment of “fair share” and the New Zealand Herald has assessed income tax on company turnover.

Whose morals and whose ideas of a “fair share” do we listen to? The NZ Herald of course are the biggest hypocrites, having their journalists “investigate” offshore companies and the tax they pay in New Zealand, all without mentioning that the Herald themselves are on the hook for dodging more than $68 million in taxes.

The only sane and moral thing is to give government the absolute minimum and only that because (a) you shouldn’t lie even to the cheating state; and (b) Inland Revenue can make your life a misery without any of the restraint that should apply in a lawful and just society.

Beyond that minimum, you should pay the government nothing.

I would rather flush $100 down the toilet than gift it to government.

I’m of a similar opinion.

I also don’t like the government sniffing through my affairs and so offshore trusts have always struck me as attractive. One day I hope to have one.

Even if you did then criminals like Rawshark and the people behind the Panama Papers hack and theft will do you over anyway.

I suppose the government could get lucky and my $100 helps cure cancer, keep a murderer at bay or feed an otherwise starving mum.

But it’s more likely to fund a deadbeat, pay a teenager to have a baby, provide a grant to a competitor, incarcerate an innocent, pay a bureaucrat to hassle me, fund the Greens or buy violence in a foreign land.

I would rather invest my $100 in business or spend it myself. Such a use is unambiguously positive. The money with the government is almost assuredly a negative.

Agree. Governments have a poor habit of “investing” in useless and ineffectual projects.

That’s why the media jihad against law-abiding citizens not paying their “fair share” is so repugnant and depressing. It’s wrong at so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s technically wrong on how tax is assessed. It’s economically illiterate on tax incidence. It’s morally wrong on what a good person should do. It’s politically wrong in equating the state with society in that somehow not paying the state its “fair share” is depriving us what’s rightfully ours.

The stories are also journalistically wrong. The Panama Papers have been stolen. They contain private and confidential information. And yet there seems no reluctance to troll through the material, publish what’s juicy, and to speculate widely what the papers might contain.

The prepared headlines suggest a dodginess without evidence and serve to justify the gross invasion of people’s private affairs.

I know this all too well. The Media jihad against me continues to this day.

It doesn’t appear to occur to reporters that they are nasty statists. That the state implicitly is everything. That it should know everything. That it should have its “fair share” as dictated by the mob despite the rules it writes and ruthlessly enforces.

And as the state’s little helpers they will make your private information public and, on the flimsiest of evidence, publicly shame you as a cheat.

It doesn’t occur to them that the intelligent and moral person’s deep and driving goal is to starve the state and then strangle it so people can live prosperously and free.

They did it to me. They claimed public interest. The real reason was political and personal. That is the problem with the current jihads and frenzy, it is all predicated on stolen documents but the Media party just laps it up.

– NBR

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. And when he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet, and as a result he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist that takes no prisoners.